This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com

When Spanish auteur Luis Bunuel released That Obscure Object of Desire in the summer of 1977, he was giving moviegoers not just a mystery, but something that now seems like prophecy about terrorism of all kinds.

This drama of sexual obsession plays out against a backdrop of random terrorist atrocities — bloody bombings, shootings and aircraft hijackings — that the characters in it barely acknowledge. They’ve grown used to violent assaults, as we have today, with attacks occurring just this past week alone in London, Paris and Tehran.

But Bunuel was also interested in the psychological terror that a powerful person can visit upon a weaker one, or rather someone who is presumed to be weaker. This is something we’re also seeing in headlines about sexual improprieties allegedly committed by Bill Cosby, Donald Trump and other self-entitled males.

Watching That Obscure Object of Desire, obtainable on DVD or VOD, is a bit like reading a 2017 newspaper transported by time machine back to 1977, although what it really deals in are eternal verities of the human condition. Current events may have us thinking that civilization is crumbling, but a film like this makes you realize the erosion began long ago.

A bizarre incident begins the story: a well-dressed man aboard a train about to leave for Paris dumps a bucket of cold water on a bruised and dishevelled woman standing outside on the Seville station platform.

Article Continued Below

The man is middle-aged Mathieu, played by Spanish actor Fernando Rey, a Bunuel film regular. The woman is 18-year-old Conchita, played in this scene by French actress Carole Bouquet.

“Let me assure you, I am not a lunatic,” Mathieu tells his fellow first-class travellers. He then proceeds, like the shipboard narrator in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, to explain his actions to his rapt listeners. Flashbacks unfold his tangled history with Conchita.

A wealthy widower living in a Seville mansion, Mathieu evidently fancies himself irresistible to women. He meets Conchita soon after she begins working for him as a maid and immediately tries to bed her.

Alarmed, she leaves his employ the next morning, but Mathieu encounters her again and again in various locations, half the time played by an entirely different actress, Spain’s Ángela Molina. Mathieu gives no indication he can perceive the substitution in women, although the audience can.

Bunuel, a leader of the Surrealist movement and dedicated expositor of human foibles in films like Belle de Jour, Tristiana and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, initially opted to use two actresses for reasons of desperation rather than art. He had to replace his first choice, Maria Schneider (Last Tango in Paris), who suddenly left the production. But the two-as-one casting decision proved to be inspired, since it adds to the air of unreality and unease that permeates the film, which turned out to be Bunuel’s last cinematic statement (he died in 1983).

Mathieu aggressively pursues Conchita throughout the film, assuming that his power and wealth are all the only tools of seduction he needs, despite the huge gap in their social status and ages. (The latter was a shocker in real life, too, since Rey was then 60, while Bouquet was 19 and Molina was 21.)

Conchita appreciates Mathieu’s attention and also the money he lavishes upon her and her impoverished mother. She likes and maybe even loves Mathieu, but refuses to be owned by him: “I wanted to give myself to you, but you tried to buy me!”

She wants Mathieu to change his way of thinking, but he just wants her to change into something more revealing. He becomes angry and abusive when he realizes that she’s not willing to merely submit to his advances and total domination of her.

As he tells his story on the train, Mathieu arrogantly assumes he’s in the right and that his fellow passengers in the first-class cabin will side with him, once they know all the facts of the situation.

The opposite transpires when the riders, and by extension we the movie watchers, realize they’re in the presence not of a great man but a first-class heel. Sound like anybody you’ve read about in the paper lately?

In his autobiography My Last Breath, published in 1982, a year before his death, Bunuel explained why he wanted to explore both personal and global acts of terrorism in That Obscure Object of Desire: “In addition to the theme of the impossibility of truly possessing a woman’s body, the film insists upon maintaining that climate of insecurity and imminent disaster — an atmosphere we all recognize, because it is our own.”

There is terror of the thought as well as of the deed. Bunuel believed in both, and with That Obscure Object of Desire he brought his ideas to fascinating fruition in a movie that seems even more vital 40 years later.

Peter Howell is the Star’s movie critic. His column usually runs Fridays.

More from the Toronto Star & Partners

LOADING

Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or distribution of this content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited and/or its licensors. To order copies of Toronto Star articles, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com